Work in Progress: Hexagon Flower Tote Bag Becomes Hexagon Flower Pillow

I won the following charm pack at a Bay Area Modern Guild Meeting and sewed it into a bunch of 4" hexagons.

The colors say autumn to me, and so I headed to a fabric shop for the right backdrop and found this linen in a color called "Potting Soil," and another coordinating fabric called "Mira Brown Tonal Mini Crosshatching" as well as brown cotton thread.  I had also stitched my hexies into a flower.  I L O V E the color combination.

I pinned down my hexagon flower onto a linen rectangle 18" x 20" which was cut down from a 20" square because I didn't anticipate the yardage I would need for the straps which necessitated another trip to the fabric shop (luckily I live close by) to buy another half yard of brown linen....and then I played with the blanket stitch on my new Babylock Katherine to decide whether to hand stitch my hexagon flower or machine stitch it down.  As you can see my stitches on the machine are a tiny bit off as I was creating a page for my stitch dictionary.

I decided to go for it.  I also think the dark thread and dark fabric hide my imperfect stitching.

I do also love the crosshatching cotton to line the interior of the tote bag. It's interesting how the color changes under the lens from no flash to flash.  I think the fabric under the flash is a more accurate representation what color the fabric looks like.

But AAAAARGGGH!  I suck as a designer!  If you look below, there's no room for me to sew box corners of even an inch (I wanted to do a 1 1/2" to 2" bottom) because part of the hexagon flower is then under the bag.  I'm not going to rip out all those labor-intensive machine stitches and re-attach the flower to a bigger piece of linen.  Instead I'm going to practice installing a zipper and turn this top into a pillow.  OH well.  I do think this is still a pretty pieced block and will make a fabulous-looking pillow.

The Modern Quilt Studio sells a Desert Islands Solid Bundle comprised of colors like Earth, Dirt, Silver, Dew, Honey, Ginger, Safari, Teal (gorgeous!) and Mud (my favorite!).  And these colors on their own which you would think are so blah! really make other colors pop and keep bright, highly saturated colors from overwhelming a viewer.  Interesting how a color interacts with other colors.  Back to reading Josef Albers's Interaction of Color.